Blast your fireworks, not your emails

Happy (pre) Independance Day! USA! USA! Are you ready to BLAST some fireworks and emails?!?! For the latter, I sincerely hope not.

The terms “blast” and “e-blast” grate on me in a really strong way. They’re antiquated terms from a time when email marketing wasn’t very advanced. They refer to the good ol’ “Batch and blast” days of email marketing, when brands would just “blast” an email to their entire list of subscribers – usually without any segmentation or personalization.

I totally get that there are plenty of brands that still send emails that way today. And for some brands, and some communications, it’s fine. While segmentation, dynamic content, personalization, personalized send time, and ~customer journeys~ are increasing in popularity, in some situations, it makes more sense just to send one version of the email, to everyone. Seriously, that’s cool. Keep doing that. Just call them emails instead please.

But I still maintain that we, as email marketers, should stop calling it a “blast.” “Blast” demeans our industry and makes us look like amateurs. If you refer to an email as a “blast” around me, you lose most of your credibility. It’s like…a code word announcing that you’re bad at marketing. And I know some people reading this are thinking I’m being over dramatic about this. But really, if we don’t care about this – who will?

To me, when someone refers to an email as a blast, what they’re really saying is, “Email marketing is easy, and any idiot with a Constant Contact account can do it. It requires no skills at all, and isn’t a field that people spend years learning and specializing in.” I’m visualizing some really old small business owner with no marketing background sending a horribly designed email that isn’t responsive, has 6 different fonts and has all of the CTAs say “click here.”

I recently hired an email marketer for my team. When I was reviewing resumes, I saw a candidate who seemed to have a lot of email experience, but the word “blast” was all over this person’s resume. Even if that’s the term the person’s company used for emails (and that’s the assumption I tried to make), it doesn’t exactly scream that this person is an experienced email marketer. Based on the resume and interview, the person’s company actually sent reasonably advanced emails, so I really don’t understand why they were calling them blasts. Someone else got the job.

Last year, briefly, I worked with an ESP different than the one I love so much. While it had some exciting capabilities with segmentation and targeted content, there was one (major) piece of the platform that made me hate using it: the send button. It didn’t say “send.” It said “Schedule this blast!” So, every single day, as part of doing my job, I had to click a button that I found seriously offensive. And again, it made that ESP lose credibility with me, which is really a shame since they have a lot of potential.

Don’t call your email a blast. Call it what it is: An email. Or a newsletter, invitation, promotion, campaign, send, message, communication, etc.

Now go blast some fireworks instead.

(If you’re wondering about my font choices in this post – the Comic Sans is just to illustrate what the phrase “email blast” looks like in my head.)

[…] text? Why can’t I make my whole email an image? Why does my email look like that in Outlook? Why do you keep making that face when I say the word “e-blast?” Why do we have “This email was sent to [email address]” in the footer? (Anyone know […]